G A R Hall

The Grand Army of the Republic. The side that won in the Civil War, and the soldiers returning to Ohio, started the George L. Waterman chapter, in honor of the Peninsula native who died during a riot of pro-​slavery idiots in Dayton. This was a long time ago. Before Fox News, even, if you can imagine. Ohio was a divided state, even back then, and Waterman was trying to return order (if not sanity) to the rabid mob. (Can you even fathom such a nightmare? A unified group of people whose primary goal is to keep an entire population economically enslaved? But enough about the American Enterprise Institute.)
Today, the G.A.R. hall sits proudly at the north-​west corner of Main Street and Riverview Road and is available for special events and private group functions. Nice bar and lounge area downstairs, a great patio off the west side, but the real attraction is the hall itself. A Civil War Museum is on permanent display, as are the original Charles Currier G.A.R. banners. At the north end of the hall is a stage, replete with grand piano and candelabra.
On the third Thursday of each month an acoustic open mic is held and scruffy hill people emerge from the dark, wooded hollers, vintage pre-​war Martins cradling their waist-​length beards. If you haven’t heard «Old Rugged Cross» played on a hipster’s $ 3000 Taylor, and miced through a 400 watt sound system while every other musician ignores them, waiting their turn to play, well you just don’t understand Americana’s rigid adherence to all things acoustic. But just amplified. Think that scene from «Animal House» where the beatnik is playing guitar on the stairs, «I gave my love a cherry that had no stone…» is fiction? Wrong again, Decemberist-​breath. It lives on in the sleepy hamlet of Peninsula, every third Thursday. As Belushi said, after smashing the guy’s guitar against a wall: «Sorry.»